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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26061214">Heart of the Labyrinth</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nelja/pseuds/Nelja-in-English'>Nelja-in-English (Nelja)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Magnus Archives (Podcast)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Backstory, Coworkers to lovers, M/M, Monsters, Sexual Content, special effects, the spiral (the magnus archives) - Freeform</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 02:55:57</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,159</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26061214</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nelja/pseuds/Nelja-in-English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>How Neil Lagorio didn't join the Spiral.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Neil Lagorio/Gabriel</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Heart of the Labyrinth</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Thanks to Onnastik for the beta!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>When Neil was a kid, his ambition was to have the scariest Halloween costume of the year.</p>
<p>It changed, and it didn't, when he started working on special effects. Of course he wanted his creations to be beautiful, of course he wanted them to feel true. But the fear was what made them remembered, what made them live forever in the audience’s dreams - in their nightmares.</p>
<p>He told it once, to a man he has been dating. It had been a short relationship, and one of the reasons was that he had considered this statement with pity. He had assumed that Neil created scary things out of frustration at not being able to create beautiful ones, that would be remembered forever. Neil had not been able to explain this feeling of being drawn to fear, a sacred terror that was second to nothing. He aimed for beauty too, mostly as a way to make the whole even more disturbing.</p>
<p>Gabriel understood this.</p>
<p>Neil had met him at a sculpture course, the cheapest he had found - as a bonus, he hadn’t been asked to study the Renaissance masters for years before starting to work. Gabriel’s works had been magical. Neil didn’t think much of abstract artists, but it seemed to him that Gabriel achieved what they had only dreamt of. A house that didn’t look like one, but that was clearly there, real, haunted.</p>
<p>“Work with me,” he asked. Maybe it was too early. Neil never felt like he had time to lose. </p>
<p>“Do you want to make me your employee?” Gabriel asked. His voice was deep, gravelly, mocking. And Neil felt clearly that his offer made no sense, not with Gabriel’s talent, that was not far from leaving Neil's totally insignificant. He took a deep breath.</p>
<p>“My partner,” he answered. “Yes, you’re a better sculptor than me. And I know how to make them move. I know how to make them scream.”</p>
<p>Gabriel actually looked at him. To Neil’s eye, Gabriel felt like one of his own sculptures. He did not have beautiful features, and instead of making him less remarkable as a human, they actually made it hard to stop looking at him. He was haunted too.</p>
<p>“Why not?” he answered. “I might have worked with you anyway.”</p>
<p>Neil's joy came with some distant fear, that he wrote off as the worry of disappointing him.</p>
<p>This fear was close to coming true when Gabriel visited his workshop. He didn’t give a look to the masks, the puppets, every domain where Neil had already perfected his art. His interest was still only in the clay sculptures. Neil felt frustrated, maybe even humiliated. He was good at what he did, and he knew it.</p>
<p>But Neil’s emotions were few and easily kept under control. He still looked professional and cold as he showed Gabriel how stop motion worked, twenty-four pictures for one second. He told him about creatures that would not only move their face and limbs, but change their whole form, slowly shapeshift into something that was made of clay and fear.</p>
<p>And Gabriel understood.</p>
<p>It was a good part of Neil’s life. Later, he would even hesitantly label it as a happy part, even if he was never sure whether his memories had been molded and reshaped like clay.</p>
<p>Gabriel gave no family name. Quickly Neil started to call him Gabe, out of a wild wish to be closer to him, and because his full name reminded him too much of a few stories he had read about how terrifying angels could be.</p>
<p>Contracts kept coming, for children’s stories at first. It was their depiction of a gorgon’s moving snake hair, in a series about legends, that offered them the opportunity for <i>Labyrinth of the Minotaur</i>.</p>
<p>They had initially been hired only for the creature, but Gabe had argued for a labyrinth partly made of white clay too, slowly taking over the white Greek marble, so progressively that it was hard to pinpoint. It was a great idea, and surprisingly, after Neil fought for it during a few meetings, it had been accepted. It meant more money, but also more work and very late nights.</p>
<p>Gabe was brilliant. Neil should probably have been jealous of him, but this night he was just admiring him. They had conceived the creature together, and they were sculpting it together. Neil was copying his textures though, hypnotic patterns that already made the creature look like he was moving, like instincts ran under his skull and made his skin shiver, before they actually started the stop motion. </p>
<p>Their ambition was for critics to disagree upon the moment where it had started to move.</p>
<p>Neil was looking at Gabe’s hands, wide and dirty and so skilled, giving birth under his fingers to something more fascinating than mere life. </p>
<p>He shivered, wondering what it would feel like to be the one touched by those fingers, to have those spirals drawn over his skin. It was like this question had waited to emerge for weeks, for months, and now it had been repressed too long, it was bursting in his body and mind, making his cheeks red and his cock hot. Making his mind empty except for one thing. Or maybe two.</p>
<p>“What are you?” he asked.</p>
<p>Gabe smiled without looking at him. “All philosophical. I’m just a worker.”</p>
<p>“What do you want from me?” Neil asked then, a stupid question only thought out of hope that the answer would end with an “and you?” But Gabe understood, once again.</p>
<p>“I will show you,” he answered. His smile was so confident for a moment, then changed...</p>
<p>And then Gabe’s mouth was no longer only a mouth, and his hands were no longer only hands, and Neil was not another worker but the work, trapped between them and wanting to be trapped. He had dreamt about this, or maybe he was only dreaming now. Pleasure crawled all over his skin, never fully reaching his insides, pressure without release, and maybe it was the first time Neil was feeling anything at all.</p>
<p>He didn’t notice when it stopped, but it left him panting with the feeling of having discovered something very scary and very precious, something he had chased all his life without knowing.</p>
<p>And then - then this very precious thing was what he wanted to create, what he wanted to show to the world. Every time they kissed, after that day, Neil felt it, some kind of creative energy going into him, making him explode, pleasure mixed with disorientation and fear. And he forever hoped for more, for Gabe to make the world crack around him again. He knew he had access to higher powers. Maybe he has always known. It felt inelegant to ask.</p>
<p>Ask why, ask how, ask about doing it, about breaking the world with fear.</p>
<p>They worked so hard, and it was glorious and terrifying. And then the director cut more than half of it.</p>
<p>They were paid the same, so why did they complain, he commented, as he turned their work into a few tasteless flashes. Neil asked for the footage. They wouldn’t give it to him. It was theirs. Gabe’s and his. So it wasn’t even actual stealing when they grabbed a key and took all of it, and they made the movie they had wanted to make.</p>
<p>They weren’t able to get the part that had been actually used, so it was just their lost scenes, and a few other cut ones. And then, Neil started frantically editing, while Gabe was redoing the few scenes that had been kept. They didn’t eat. They didn’t sleep. They kissed often, their bodies touching and opening like they were melting together, and Neil didn’t know what it did to Gabe, but to him it was a shot of imagination directly into his veins, his head dizzy, his blood burning. They glued the movie together, but they didn’t watch it, not yet.</p>
<p>“Eager?” Gabe asked. Neil wasn’t sure whether the question was asked to him or to the movie, waiting with a dark maw.</p>
<p>“What are you?” Neil asked, the tension before this being strong enough again to make the important questions explode out of him.</p>
<p>“I’m no one. Ask yourself what you are,” Gabe answered, without a trace of emotion. “My apprentice?”</p>
<p>Neil hoped he had been more than that. They had been partners and lovers and he had burned for Gabe, but now only the red of humiliation was burning his cheeks. “It’s not like you really explained anything to me.”</p>
<p>“Explanations just prevent you from feeling the truth of things. Do you want to understand?”</p>
<p>“Yes!”</p>
<p>“Then let’s watch.”</p>
<p>Neil was already feeling trapped, only able to say yes, so it was no wonder that the labyrinth caught him. It caught the victims after all, they were imprisoned in the walls, a scream caught dying on their lips as their lungs became clay, becoming part of the hellish place that trapped them, as statues, as stones, and still alive, losing their minds. And then the Minotaur is here, part of the labyrinth too, part of them all, with a fragment of every body and every mind and every fear, and maybe there always was a monster, or maybe it’s just the changed victims, taking revenge, not letting any of the visitors keep the freedom that outraged them.</p>
<p>And then Neil was in the labyrinth too, running, from the monster or towards him, he didn’t know. He wanted to meet it. It was his work. If the monster needed to tear off something from his hands, from his mind, it was only fair. </p>
<p>Its moving face was more than everything Neil had imagined, open mouth, wanting to devour him. He was so excited by the beauty of it, and its muscular torso, and its wild, animal legs, and its spiralling horns made from dripping last screams. He knew it wouldn’t hurt. He knew he was just the missing piece for it to exist fully, out of this movie they would be the only ones to see, out of the movie that would be showed on screens, out in the world.</p>
<p>And then what spoiled the glory for him was spite and pride. Because this beautiful ending, turning into a work of art and fear, it was what Gabe had wanted for him, haunting his own work forever, a trap sprung, caught in a bigger trap. And Neil didn’t want to be a work or even a tool. He had loved Gabe, as much as he was able to love, but he didn’t want to give everything of himself without getting anything, even answers.</p>
<p>This was the way he escaped the labyrinth.</p>
<p>He was back to his studio, and the movie was not running, and Gabe was not here. Frustration was gnawing at him, his heart beating hard and furiously. He called for him, called for an answer. He felt something slippery under his foot. He looked. It was some of the clay they had used for the sculptures.</p>
<p>It was crawling. It was reaching for him, here, in reality. His foot was stuck, and the walls were already becoming less distinct, like they didn’t know from which world they came from. Neil twisted his ankle, left his shoe behind, and ran.</p>
<p>“Gabe, come at once!” he demanded, feeling weak and panicked, lost in his own house and in his own heart. He never loved him, he tried to convince himself, but lying to himself only seems to make him more appetising to the crawling clay. </p>
<p>He reached the room where he kept the puppets, and they were all huge and threatening, wanting to eat him alive too, a gallery of monsters with red eyes and long spindly legs and huge teeth. They were moving, of course they were, part of the nightmare. They would eat him too. </p>
<p>He chose them. He dived and hid behind a huge spider leg. He looked for the controls, but wasn’t able to reach them. He closed his eyes.</p>
<p>The clay didn’t catch him. When he opened his eyes again, it was gone.</p>
<p>The film was on the table in the projection room - it hadn’t been there before. There was a hastily scribbled note in Gabe’s handwriting, letters crawling on paper like snakes. “We had fun. Well played.” Neil knew he would never see him again, and he felt angry enough about it to forget what he had lost.</p>
<p>He took up the challenge and watched the movie. It was terrifying. But he wasn’t caught in it. It was just watching, and shivering, and maybe screaming at parts. It left a scar in his mind, but it was one he relished, not like the scar in his heart.</p>
<p>He decided he could do this again. He was brilliant, and he had seen the underside of the world.</p>
<p>He didn’t need Gabe. He didn’t need him at all.</p>
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